All being well, the new issue should begin to mail out next week/weekend. It's the first in the new format. Black Static readers will know what to expect: about 3cm smaller than before, but with 32 more page inside (96 total) on thicker uncoated paper, spine, thicker gloss laminated cover. Still in full colour throughout.

It's slightly different printing on uncoated paper btw. So I had my monitor calibrated and installed a couple more colour profiles, which means IZ242 (onwards) shouldn't print dark, and should look exactly as it does on my freshly calibrated monitor. Fingers crossed.

The cover art is the latest in Ben Baldwin's Tarot series, The Priestess. Six stories of good length by Ken Liu, Priya Sharma, Debbie Urbanski, Lavie Tidhar, C.W. Johnson, Karl Bunker. Interior illustrations by Richard Wagner, Mark Pexton, Warwick Fraser-Coombe. All the usual features, including a bigger Book Zone and an interview with David Brin (by Jim Steel).

Contents, images and extracts are on the Current Issue page of the Interzone section.

We hope you enjoy the issue and look forward to your comments. Please feel free to post cover and other image(s) to blogs, facebook pages, wherever -- anything you can do to help spread the word is much appreciated!

NB: if there was a subscription reminder in either of the previous two issues (a cross and an issue number on the reminder, plus the dreaded red dot on your address sheet) and you haven't renewed yet, please do so before the new issue mails out or I'll get all sad.

IZ242 has arrived. Immediate impressions? Didn't think it riffled quite as well as BS29 did (different printer), but the packing gnomes disagree and think I'm being way too precious. Colours and other things seem fine. Perhaps need to make the inside margins a little bit wider, but the binding is robust and can take a considerable amount of stress. There's always going to be something to improve upon, goes without saying.

Let me know what you think when you get your copy.

Not related to production as such, my 'needlepoint' thumbnail version of Martin Hanford's beautiful illustration for Priya Sharma's story is too small for that to really work. Oh well. It looks OK, you just can't see the needlepoint pattern/texture. That was five minutes in Photoshop wasted.

Oh dear. Just realised that the dateline and cover price is missing. I'd like to blame those who were giving me jip at the same time, but I don't suppose I can. Normally supply a cover such as this flat, but the printer wanted front and back separately. Last minute. Guess I must've made a new file, copied and pasted, but somehow managed to leave the date and price behind. Don't know how this is going to get sold in shops -- or for how much! Can't say it's been a very good day.

Yes, barcode is present which is a bit of a saviour, though according to our heroic distributor a good deal of stickering might still be required, for which we might well be charged.

But I'm sorry to say that we've since discovered a major problem, a lot more serious than a mistake. There's a horrendous amount of misregistration on too many copies, rendering a number of pages blurred and unreadable. Obviously a similar percentage of distributor copies will be affected too, so I've put a stop on those, they won't be going anywhere. Not doing any more subscriber copies for now either, because no doubt a lot of those we've already done have the problem, and since we first spotted it most copies since are also tragic rejects.

Meanwhile the printers will be considering these problems and if I have my way will be embarking on a complete reprint. I'll get that done as quickly as possible so hopefully it'll only put us back another few days. (Black Static 30 is still to arrive.)

Commiserations. Had a few disastrous jobs like that over the years. About ten years ago I brushed the Enter key just before running off a postscript file (at least I think that's what must have happened), so the text of the whole issue was pushed on by one half-page column... Luckily the printers hadn't even looked at the reference copy I had to supply back in those days, so they did the whole thousand-copy print run again free of charge.

I was a printer for several years, Andy. If they're out of register then it's definitely the fault of the printer.

Oh I know that!!! The difference of opinion we have is me wanting a complete reprint and the printer wanting to check through every single copy (really?) to decide whether any of them are within tolerance (presumably) in order to send those back to me and reprint the ones that aren't. Which is ridiculous. Even the copies that I might've grudgingly sent out aren't exactly "perfect" (the director I spoke to yesterday has 25 copies and they are all "perfect") because there is clearly some misregistration on certain pages -- it's also my contention, btw, that the text on these pages is slightly blurred. I've checked them with a magnifying glass. The printer's standards are very clearly different to mine.

Today the printer is collecting all the copies from me and the distributor. I've already told them that I don't want any of the copies back, because apart from the fact that they aren't "perfect" anyway, by the time they get back here they'll have gone through quite a bit of packing, and a lot of them have already been bagged up for postage, unbagged, manually checked, and I don't really want to send out magazines to subscribers and retail that look second hand.

Should know by Monday what they intend to do. If it's a full reprint, fine. If it's not, I'll get the magazine printed by another printer, hopefully quickly, though it will cost considerably more money. I might pass the hat round. It's all doubly disappointing because this is a printer I've used for years.

I've kept a couple of copies back. I might take photos later and post them here so you can see what I'm talking about.

Isn't that a bit *odd* for a printing job with a spine?I admit my experience at dealing with printers is limited, but it sounds iffy, especially as a 'last minute' change.

Well, yes and no, not really. I perhaps should have said that I used a different uploading method for the first time, so changed the way I normally supply the cover at the last minute. It does seem a bit odd but it's the way this particular system works -- the advantage is that I'm in effect putting the pages through the rip myself, and can check/approve the soft proofs at the same time. I hope that makes sense!

Normally you'd hope to spot the missing dateline and price on a cover proof before approving it...

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